Everyone is dealing with something.  Maybe multiple things.

Think about the people on your own street, or in your own household. Someone is caring for a parent who needs more help every month. Someone is up at 3 a.m. worried about their bills. Someone is lonely and hasn't had a real conversation in days. Someone just wants their kid to find one good friend.

None of that shows up on a demographic profile, and classic “marketing personas” generally don’t capture it. Yet all of it shapes what people are seeking, including what they hope a home and community will do for them.

You can think of this as “the human condition” - the ordinary, shared challenges of being a person - or perhaps more accurately as a collection of “the human conditions” which are far more common than we may recognize or care to admit.

You can also think of this / these as an opportunity to drive impact in your community.

Here are 25 examples of “the human conditions.” This is a representative set, not a complete list.

·        Loneliness and social isolation: about 1 in 2 adults report feeling lonely

·        Cardiovascular disease: 48.6% of adults have some form of it

·        Obesity: 40.3% of adults, over 100 million people

·        Diabetes and prediabetes: 40.1 million with diabetes, 115.2 million with prediabetes

·        Chronic pain: 24.3% of adults, about 1 in 4

·        Physical inactivity: only 47.2% of adults meet activity guidelines

·        Insufficient sleep: 30.5% of adults get less than 7 hours a night

·        Substance use disorder: 48.4 million people aged 12 and older (16.8%)

·        Anxiety and depression symptoms: about 1 in 5 adults

·        Mental illness: 23.4% of adults, 61.5 million people

·        Stress about money, health, and the economy: 63–65% cite these as top stressors

·        Digital overload: about half of teens say they're online "almost constantly"

·        Housing cost burden: 43.5 million households, owners and renters combined

·        Financial anxiety: 80% of Americans report being anxious about finances

·        Household financial strain: 36.4% struggle to pay usual expenses

·        Food insecurity: 47.4 million people, including 13.8 million children

·        Family caregiving: 63 million adults, about 1 in 4

·        Aging: 78 million Americans are 65 or older, and they'll soon outnumber children

·        Lack of nature: over 100 million people live more than a 10-minute walk from a park

·        Low health literacy: only 12% of adults are proficient, and 36% are at basic or below

·        Worry about crime: 8 in 10 Americans worry about it

·        Autism spectrum: 1 in 31 eight-year-olds identified

·        Disability, physical and mental: 28.7% of adults, over 70 million people

·        Social media and kids: up to 95% of teens use it, and about a third say "almost constantly"

·        Alzheimer's and dementia: 7.2 million Americans 65 and older, nearly 13 million by 2050

Now picture a family of six: a father in the middle of a major life transition; a mother stretched between her nursing job, kids, and her aging parents; a teenager afraid of losing her friends when the family moves; a young son who needs a school that fits how he learns; and two grandparents who want to be close without being underfoot, who are also undergoing their own challenges with aging.

That isn't a persona. It's a real household experiencing the human conditions.

Now multiply those households by the thousands … by the millions. 

If you are community builder, this is your market.

Here is the positive point of all of that: these conditions are what connect us to each other.  These conditions certainly don't respect the lines we draw between people when we create market segments and personas.

A 38-year-old marketing manager and a 68-year-old retiree might sit in completely different marketing segments, with different ages, incomes, and media habits. But both may be caring for a parent. Both may be lonely. Both may be quietly worried about money. Marketing personas put them in different rooms. The human condition puts them in the same one. That creates opportunity for impact.

These conditions are what drive people to seek impact.  People don't really go looking for square footage. They go looking for relief, belonging, and a way through. They seek health, comfort, connection, opportunity, and purpose. Those five things are what a home and a community are really being asked to deliver.

A clinic can treat a diagnosis. A community does something different. It shortens the walk to the park, puts a neighbor within knocking distance, hosts the team someone gets invited to, and turns the farmers market into a Saturday habit. We spend most of our lives inside our homes and the few blocks around them. That's where these challenges are lived, so it's where the answers are most likely to be found.  The evidence of this is very strong.

Personas generally sort people by who they are on paper: an age, an income, a household size, a first name, a stock photo. They may attempt to include behaviors. Yet personas tend to split people who likely share the same challenges into separate buckets, and they often hide the very things for which a community can be most helpful. They also do not come close to reflecting the infinite differences between individuals, even those with shared demographics, and shared challenges.

Even the best persona describes a fictional type of person. It doesn't tell you what that person is dealing with, and doesn’t tell you what that specific person, or that household, needs at that moment in time.

Here are just a couple of examples of perspectives on how personas fall short:

·        CX Network, marketing leaders on why persona-based marketing falls short. TIAA's CMO says personas are too simplistic to reflect what differentiates individual customers.

·        Content Marketing Institute, Are Buyer Personas Just Nicer Words for Stereotypes?. Marketers argue it out. One market researcher asks who considers themselves "average" in the first place. (note: the Kelsey Ferrara listed in this article is of no relation to Vin Ferrara :)

If these shared conditions are what connect people, and create opportunity for community impact, the next question is how a community finds out what someone is dealing with, without intruding or turning a home tour into an intake form.

Next week I'll share a proposed approach. It draws on a field called “narrative medicine,” developed by Dr. Rita Charon, a physician with a doctorate in literature, at Columbia University's medical school. Charon noticed that the most important things patients told her never made it into the chart, so she built a practice around treating listening as a skill that can be taught. It rests on three ideas:

·        Attention: being fully present when someone speaks

·        Representation: capturing what you hear in the person's own words

·        Affiliation: using it to genuinely connect, which Charon calls the whole point

Medicine is where it began, but the insight works in real estate: people are more than their diagnoses, and more than their demographics.  They are more than personas.

If you “listen for impact” you can gather people’s narratives up front, and that gives you the ability to help them in a deeper way.